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She set the new white candle on a saucer, lighted the candle, and put saucer and candle on the bedroom floor in front of a small table covered with china figures that Delgado and the children had given her over the years. On the table were two plump Bud- dhas, the head of an American Indian (Mrs. Santana believes that Buddhas and Indians bring good luck), and statues of Christ, St. Barbara, and St. Martín de Porres, a seventeenth-cen- tury half-caste, who is her favorite saint. Her son Rafael was supposed to drive from Dover, New Jersey, to New York that day. The last time he had made the trip, it had rained and he had wrecked his car. Mrs. Santana feared for his safety. 'The can- dle was her appeal to Santa Clara, the patroness of good weather, childbirth, and television, to stop the rain. Rafael had spent the past year shuttling be- tween two wives. One wife-Diana López, eighteen, a niece of Casilda's ex-husband, Roberto Figueroa, and of lnocencia Castillo's husband, Reynaldo Figueroa-was currently living in Dover. The other-Rosa Cruz, a six- teen-year-old former classmate of Ino- cencia Castillo's-lived in Brooklyn. Rafael had recently been taken into the heroin business by Roberto Fi- gueroa. With part of his earnings, he had rented and furnished apartments fo r both his wi ves. Shortly after two, Gabriel Santana bounded into the apartment. He had been released from school an hour ear- ly to attend a catechism class. He finds religious-instruction classes dull and usually cuts them. I-lis mother doesn't care. She lights an occasional votive candle, and on welfare and hospital forms that ask for her religion she states that she is a Catholic, but she attends Mass only at Christmas and Easter, and doesn't hold the clergy in high esteem. "Once the priests started marrying, we saw that they were just as bad as the rest of us," she says. Mrs. Santana could just as accurately have put on the forms that she is a spiritualist, for she believes in the efficacy of curses and spells. It was a spell that had made her leave her favorite husband, Ángel Castillo (she suspected his mother of having cast it), and a spell that had made her remain with Vicente San- tan'!, her least-favorite husband, for ten years. Gabriel remembered that it was the twentieth of the month, and asked his mother for the mOnè) she had promised to give him on check day for a karate outfit. He had forgotten that check day would be his day of reckoning. He looked puzzled and then sheepish when his mother ac- cused him, at the top of her voice, of n1isappropria6ng two dollars from the bodega. Gabriel made no excuses He carefully put a row of Delgado's mod drip-dry shirts and flared slacks be- tWeen him and his mother. \Vhen Mrs. Santana is angry, she often swats her children; they have learned to keep their distance and re- main silent until her anger subsides. Gabriel is considered by his mother the best-looking of the four Santana chil- dren. Emilio, Vicente, and María have inherited their parents' mulatto com- plexions, broad noses, puffy lips, and kInky hair. Gabriel bears a closer re- semblance to Vicente Santana's white father and to Mrs. Santana's white grandfather. He has fine featu res, wavy black hair, and light skin. He is taller and slimmer than his older brothers. Gabriel is also the most high- strung and temperamental of the San- tan<:l chiJdren. When someone says something that offends him, he be- comes enraged and throws the nearest available object at the offender. (He is still greatly admired within the family for having had the nerve to throw a can of corn at his father in 1969.) He boasts of his light skin, taunting other members of the family for looking like blacks. \\Then Mrs. Santana WdS pregnant with Gabriel, two-year-old Vicente had toppled over a rickety hall railing and t.tllen two floors, breaking a leg and requiring eight stitches in his head. She attributes Gabnel's nervousness to the shock she suffered over Vicente's fall. Several years ago, Mrs. Santana had been per- suaded to take Gabriel to a hospital for neurological tests. She went to the hospital with hÎ1n twice, but it was a long, tiring journey from her apart- Inent and she stopped going be- fore his condition had been di- agnosed. At three, Marla Santana can1e home from school in the company of her friend Lillian Álvarez, who had been wditing patiently on the front stoop for her for hours. Lillian's moth- er, Margie Mendoza, an Italian woman whose husbands have included blacks and Puerto Ricans, didn't believe the public schools were good enough fot her three comely daughters. She couldn't afford to send them to parochi- al schools, so she let them stay home. María, a slender ten-year-old tomboy with a fetching smile, the vocabulary of a roustabout, a habit of sllcking her thumb, dnd a precocious knowledge of